Chapter 7: The Letter
Patrick's father spent four days in hospital.
It wasn't as serious as the first call had suggested — a warning, the doctors said, not the event itself.
He came home on a Friday with new medication and instructions he would probably argue with.
But those four days changed something.
Carol stayed with Goldie the first night.
Then Patrick's neighbor took over for the days he needed to be at the hospital.
But on the third evening, when Patrick came home briefly to sleep, he found a note on the kitchen table in Goldie's handwriting.
*Auntie Carol taught me how Mum used to do a fishtail plait.
She said Mum learned it from Grandma.
She showed me on my hair.
I did it myself at the end.
Dad you have to learn this one too.*
Patrick told me this afterward.
He said he stood at the kitchen table and read it three times.
Then he went to the drawer in his bedroom — the one at the back, behind the instruction manuals and the old birthday cards — and he took out the letter.
He didn't read it again.
He already knew what it said.
He put it in an envelope, wrote Carol's name on the front, and left it on the table.
When Carol came the next morning to drop Goldie's forgotten PE kit, she found it there.
Patrick was in the kitchen.
He didn't explain it.
He just said, "Nadia wrote that for you.
She asked me to give it to you.
I should have done it a long time ago.
I'm sorry."
Carol picked it up.
Her hands were shaking.
"Do you want me to leave while you read it?" he asked.
"No," she said.
"Please stay."
She sat down at the kitchen table — the same table where Goldie had left her note — and she opened it.
I wasn't there for this.
Patrick told me about it later, in the café near the library, the same table as before.
He said Carol read it twice without speaking.
He said he made tea because he didn't know what else to do with his hands.
He said when she finally looked up, she wasn't crying the way he had expected.
"She looked like someone who had been given something back," he said.
"Something she thought was gone."
"What did you feel?" I asked him.
He thought about it for a long time.
"I felt like I'd finally done what she asked me to do," he said.
"Nadia.
I felt like I'd finally listened to her."
He looked at his coffee.
"She was always better at this than me.
At knowing when to let go and when to hold on.
I held on to the wrong thing for two years." He paused.
"The anger felt like loyalty.
It wasn't."
Outside the café window, the street was ordinary — people walking, a delivery van double-parked, pigeons on the pavement.
"What did the letter say?" I asked.
"You don't have to tell me."
"I don't mind," he said.
"It said what I told you it said.
That she forgave her.
That she loved her.
That she wanted Carol in Goldie's life." He stopped.
"And it said one more thing.
It said — *tell Patrick I said he's allowed to be happy again.
He'll need someone to tell him that.
He won't believe it from himself.*"
The café was very quiet.
"She knew you," I said.
"She knew me completely," he said.
And for the first time since I had met him, the grief on his face was not only grief.
There was something else underneath it.
Something that had just been given permission to exist.
He paid for the coffees again.
At the door, he paused.
"Goldie asked Carol to come to the winter concert," he said.
"She asked her herself.
Walked up to her and asked." He shook his head slightly.
"Nine years old."
"She's her mother," I said.
He smiled.
The same smile I had seen in the car park after the first concert, the one that had appeared without warning and changed his whole face.
May you like
"Yes," he said.
"She is."
